Drew Sawyer (’04) was driving to a Fourth of July weekend getaway in Maine when he got the call. Marcela Guerrero (MA’05, PhD’15) had been building toward this moment for years.
Both handled the news that they’d been offered the opportunity to curate the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York — the longest-running survey of American art, and one of the preeminent events in the art world — in very different ways. As alumni of the Department of Art History, they’re united both by their training at UW and their determination to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I wanted to scream,” chuckles Sawyer when asked about his initial reaction to the offer. “But I told them, I would think about it over the weekend. Obviously, I was going to say yes, but I also tried to play it cool.”
Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, had been with the museum less than a year when he learned that Guerrero wanted him to join her in curating the event. Guerrero, the museum’s DeMartini Family Curator, had eight years under her belt at the Whitney and had been appointed the first Latinx assistant curator in the museum’s history in 2023.
“I know his scholarship,” she says. “He has incredible taste, an incredible eye and a great work ethic.”
The 2024 Whitney Biennial, dubbed “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” featured the work of 71 different artists, tied together by a response to both the incursion of artificial intelligence into the art space and the modern political rhetoric around marginalized groups. Guerrero and Sawyer have yet to determine the theme and the name of their own exhibit — in no small part because they’re preoccupied with drafting its roster.
Since August of 2024, Guerrero and Sawyer have spent a large chunk of their time touring the country and visiting studios, speaking with artists whose work might potentially be included in the mix. They included a stop at UW–Madison in early February to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the department from which they both graduated, speaking as part of a panel on the changing role of curation.
“We wanted to talk to as many artists as we could,” explains Guerrero. “Having the freedom, the ability to observe and absorb.”
Puerto Rico, the country where Guerrero earned her undergraduate degree, was their first stop. The island’s artists have been featured in several recent Whitney Biennials and were also the focus of a survey about art in the wake of Hurricane Maria that Guerrero curated at the museum last year. It also fits an evolving idea for the Whitney Biennial Guerrero and Sawyer both share.
“It poses a way to think about the U.S. in an expansive way,” explains Guerrero. “We’re doing visits with artists who were born in the United States, but now work in other countries, such as Mexico, France and Germany.”
Sawyer says that focus is in keeping with the Biennial’s gradual shift from a more New York-centric focus to something much broader.
“What is America in 2025 and 2026?” asks Sawyer, noting that the exhibit will coincide with the country’s 250th anniversary.
Both admit their biggest challenge is a seriously compressed timeline. Guerrero observes that typically, large group exhibitions like this one come together over the course of as many as four to five years.
“This is a much faster pace,” she says. “Out of the hundreds and hundreds of artists whose studios we’ll visit, we’ll be able to include just a fraction of those.”
Sawyer, who grew up in Iowa, was drawn to study at UW–Madison not by art history, but the university’s economics curriculum, and ended up graduating with both an economics and an art history degree. The pair of art history courses he took with Nancy Rose Marshall, a professor who studies 19th-century art and visual culture, deeply inspired him.
“Those were really what opened me up to the field,” he says. “And also to history and politics. Particularly as an 18-year-old from Iowa, it introduced me to a way of thinking that forever changed the way I thought about the world. That did not happen for me in economics. It happened for me in art history.”
Guerrero came to UW as a graduate student in 2003 after completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Puerto Rico. One of her professors there had earned a master’s degree in Madison, and Guerrero was intrigued by the idea of an art history department housed in an art museum (the Chazen, which was then known as the Elvehjem). She recalls being particularly influenced by Professor of Art History Jill Casid, the director of the department’s graduate studies program.
“The idea of how an empire can build a visual discourse,” says Guerrero of what she learned during her time here. “And how, within this, there are people who have the agency to build a counternarrative was eye-opening for somebody coming from the Caribbean.”
The 2026 Whitney Biennial is scheduled to open in spring of next year.